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CNBC Analyst Loses It Over Obama’s Buffett Rule: ‘Absolutely Not!’

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Rick Santelli, the CNBC analyst who was the impetus for the Tea Party movement, absolutely lost it Wednesday while talking about Obama’s Buffett rule, which would raise taxes on the top income earners. Santelli’s argument? The whole thing is a bait-and-switch, and it wouldn’t even do anything to put a dent in the debt. Or as Santelli says, “Debt!”

“Let’s play a little game,” Santelli said while using a whiteboard to illustrate his points, later adding: “Take a million dollars away from these people [the rich]! Just take a whole million from them, okay! … You see what I’m getting at? Gee, let’s take a billion away from those filiers, what does that do? It cleans out one month [of the debt]!”

“You see what the problem is,” he went on. “We could bash people, we could drag the people who used to be called successful … down.”

He added: “Does the commander-in-chief have a solution? Absolutely not!”

Then he reached defcon 1*:

People don’t really want to hear solutions. They want to change the dialogue, bait and switch, so we get more worried about what people pay, what’s fair! You know what, how are my kid’s opportunities affected by how many millionaires there are? I don’t see that their opportunities are affected! You know what I see that’s going to affect their opportunities? 15.6 Trillion!